Tesco mobile strategy focuses on Nokia, not iPhone

Nick Lansley, head of research and development at Tesco.com, says 'busy mums' are Nokia users

Tesco has admitted that the iPhone does not take prime position in its mobile strategy, claiming that more Tesco shoppers are Nokia users.

Nick Lansley, head of research and development at Tesco.com, admits the company is just finishing user-acceptance testing of the iPhone version, but opted to launch the Nokia app first in an effort to target busy mums.

The supermarket chain announced a new grocery app for Nokia handsets last week. The app allows users to search for products and add them to their online basket. It is synchronised with Tesco.com customers’ online shopping accounts.

“When we did look at the sort of phones [Tesco shoppers] have, we saw that plenty of them had Nokia phones," Lansley wrote in his blog, "So we invited Nokia to come and map their phone data onto our demographic data and we confirmed much more overlap with their Series-60 smartphones than we did with iPhone. Maybe not a surprise, but we needed to see the evidence.”

“The biggest cold, hard fact is that a much greater percentage of our core customer-base for online shopping have a Series-60 Nokia phone than an iPhone,” he added.